Page 63 - Alison Balsom Quiet City FULL BOOK

and avant-garde. But it has a soundscape that’s just ravishing. Again,
it felt like such a privilege for there to be a trumpet part: a haunting,

lonely solo trumpet voice that made me love the piece and want to

play it and have an opportunity to record it. And it’s a short piece, so
you’re never going to really know how to curate it and have an

opportunity to record a piece like this. I was delighted that I felt that it

fitted in on this disc.

Photo: Hugh Carswell.

The orchestration of Miles is fantastic. How much of it is close to the

original, and what modifications did you do?

That line that Miles Davis played at the time — he had worked this
out; he wasn’t just improvising throughout. What he actually did on

that final recording was transcribed. He was very deliberate on what

ended up on that album, and it wasn’t an accident or a decision to just

use the best take. So that got transcribed, and that’s what I recorded
and played, in homage to Miles Davis as the composer of the trumpet

line of that piece. There were one or two moments which I knew were